"Coming to Tasmania, the spiritual birthplace if you like of the Greens movement, it seemed the right time and place to get back into politics," Mr Davenport said.

Born in the United Kingdom, Mr Davenport worked as a councillor in the city of Preston in North-West England for six years.

"It's not too dissimilar from Launceston - a city of about 100,000 people. It was also on the banks of a river," Mr Davenport said.

"I was quite successful in getting the council to make moves on protecting residents from flooding issues, protecting homes and stopping some pretty destructive development plans that were in the pipeline."

Mr Davenport, who is Australian on his father's side, decided to move to Australia 10 years ago.

"I was a member of the Labor party in the UK so it seemed natural to join the Labor party in Australia but having seen their failure on policies like refugees and climate change I realised the Labor party here is not the same as the Labor party in the UK," he said.

"The Greens were much more in line with my principles and beliefs."

When he came to Australia, Mr Davenport reviewed where he was at professionally and decided to pursue social work.

"I had a particular interest in issues around child protection and child safety," he said.

"Social work was a natural extension of my general ethos around public service and working for the community."

Over the past 10 years, Mr Davenport has worked across difference states in the field of child protection.

"I've had an involvement with families in the most difficult and traumatic situations that you might imagine," he said.

"That experience really informs my knowledge about some of the complexities families face in Tasmania."

It's this wide background in terms of professional and political experience which Mr Davenport says makes him the best candidate for Rosevears in the upcoming Legislative Council election.

Mr Davenport said the three core areas he stood for were climate action, sustainability and cleaning up politics.

"For me, there is no bigger issue than climate change," he said.

"While in the here and now things like COVID-19 and its economic repercussions are in the forefront of people's minds, climate change hasn't gone away.

"It's a local issue because it affects how we live our lives.

"It will affect our access to food, water and energy. It will affect our health and wellbeing into the future.

"Rosevears needs a climate champion."

Mr Davenport said sustainability was an issue he would aim to raise as part of everything the Parliament did.

"It has wider implications for our way of life because sustainability should in terms of everything," he said.

"Building greater sustainability means reducing waste and building productivity.

"Every job has the potential to be part of a green economy. Teaching, nursing, local businesses can be."

He said he did not want to see governments take a path of austerity, for example by failing to raise the rate of JobSeeker, out of the COVID-19 crisis.

"We know historically, recovery from recessions has always been worse when austerity has been implemented," Mr Davenport said.

"It's not the recession that actually does the damage, it's the response to the recession."

In terms of cleaning up politics, Mr Davenport said the Greens had a proud history of being independent from vested interests.

"The Greens have a long-standing record of steering clear of that influence," he said.

"It's also about raising how vested interests are affecting our politics and undermining our democracy."

A much deeper conversation needs to be had about reconciliation and signing a treaty with Aboriginal people in Tasmania, Mr Davenport said.

"It needs to happen now," he said.

"This has been going on for 200 years - oppression because of colonisation.

"At what point do we finally face up to our history?"

Mr Davenport said this needed to start by looking at how particular places and monuments have been named, for example, with the renaming of Batman Bridge on the Tamar River because of John Batman's role in the persecution of Aboriginal people in the 19^th century.

In addition to stating his support for restoring the House of Assembly to 35 seats, Mr Davenport said he was in favour of having dedicated seats within the Parliament for Aboriginal people.

"Aboriginal people have pointed to this as being something that would improve their situation and I think we should follow their lead for a change," Mr Davenport said.

Mr Davenport said he would approach legislation in the upper house by considering what side the evidence was on, not based on what lobby groups or political donors were asking him to do.

"If the evidence isn't there, chances are I'm going to be opposed to something," he said.

"If the evidence is there to support the changes that are coming through, and it's coming from an evidence-based background rather than a philosophically-driven background, then you've got a better chance of getting my vote in the Legislative Council."

Mr Davenport said he did not support mandatory minimum sentencing, for example for child sex offences, because the evidence of professionals showed mandatory minimum sentencing did not work.

"It seems to be a misplaced way of dealing with a wider problem," Mr Davenport said.

"We need to be looking at the structural and systemic issues that relate to child sexual abuse.

"Mandatory sentencing is not going to do it not least because most offenders will never be charged, much less prosecuted.

"We need to be dealing with how child sexual abuse occurs in society."

The government's Major Projects legislation, which is expected to be tabled in Parliament in August, is of concern to Mr Davenport.

"It's undermining democracy. It's undermining our right to representation. It's undermining the power and efficacy of elected representatives and it undermines local government," he said.

"In every branch of democratic structure the power and the authority are taken away.

"It means vested interests will have more control than they do now over future projects."

In terms of advocating for climate action in the Parliament, Mr Davenport said he would go about this by looking first at how legislation impacted the environment.

"Even if it looks relatively unrelated at first glance it's about considering what are the long-term impacts," he said.

"One of the problems we've got in governance is a lack of strategic vision and we need to bring that back in."